Josefina Niggli
| Josefina Maria Niggli | |
|---|---|
| Born | Josephine Niggli July 13, 1910 Monterrey, Nuevo León, Mexico |
| Died | December 17, 1983 (aged 73) Cullowhee, North Carolina, United States |
| Occupation | playwright, novelist, professor, screenwriter |
| Language | English |
| Nationality | Mexican, American |
| Citizenship | US |
| Education | Master's degree |
| Alma mater | Incarnate Word College; University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill |
| Genre | drama, novels |
| Subject | Mexican history and culture |
| Notable works | Mexican Village |
Josefina Niggli (1910–1983; birth name was Josephine) was a Mexican-born Anglo-American playwright and novelist. Writing about Mexican-American issues in the middle years of the century, before the rise of the Chicano movement, she was the first and, for a time, the only Mexican American writing in English on Mexican themes; her egalitarian views of gender, race and ethnicity were progressive for their time and helped lay the groundwork for such later Chicana feminists as Gloria Anzaldúa, Ana Castillo and Sandra Cisneros. Niggli is now recognized as "a literary voice from the middle ground between Mexican and Anglo heritage." Critic Elizabeth Coonrod Martinez has written that Niggli should be considered on a par such widely praised Spanish-language contemporaries as Mariano Azuela, Martín Luis Guzmán and Nellie Campobello. She is thought to be the only Mexican-American woman to have a theatre named after her.
Niggli was born on July 13, 1910 in Monterrey, Nuevo León, into an expatriated Euro-American family from the U.S. (her father, of Swiss-Alsatian descent, was from Texas, and her mother, who was Irish-French-German, from Virginia). Because of the Mexican Revolution, she was sent out of Mexico in 1913, and spent much of her youth between Monterrey and San Antonio, Texas. As a teenager in San Antonio, and in spite of being an Anglo, she felt that she didn't belong and wished to be back in Monterrey; these feelings formed the basis of her first book of poetry, Mexican Silhouettes, published in 1928 with the help of her father. As a student at Incarnate Word College, Niggli was prompted by her teachers to become a writer, leading to awards from Ladies' Home Journal and the National Catholic College Poetry Award.
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